The Durango Independent Film Festival kicked off a few days ago, with 76 films, mostly documentary features and shorts. Thursday was a cold and sunny day here in Durango, typical for winter in the high desert areas of the Rockies. Living on the edge of the desert added some personal resonance to three films – Water the Clear Solution, The Hatch, and Exploring the Mother of Waters – about the impact of water on our lives.

First up, Water: The Clear Solution. Water is a social force. For girls in developing nations, water is a scarce commodity for access to education, an equally scarce commodity. The film features the work of group called Blue Planet Run, which is planning a 14,000 mile relay run to raise awareness about the lack of drinking for 1.2 billion people. Here is one thing which stuck in my mind: water-related diseases cause 80% of the world’s deaths, according to Blue Planet Run. Here is another: for the price of two nuclear submarines, the group claims it could provide 200 million people clean drinking water for life. Then the girls don’t have to spend 6 hours every day hauling water. The run starts June 1^st, details at blueplanetrun.org.

If you are a fly fisherman, you should see The Hatch. The movie lets the cat out of the bag about a big, big event in a small, small place. The Gunnison River at the bottom of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado had a secret. You know, even though the short revealed the secret, after seeing how incredible irritated some of the fishing guides in the movie were, you’ll have to earn it and watch the movie yourself. 

The last 20 years have been lean years for fans of nature in cinema. Absent Werner Herzog, John Boorman or the latest epic about Mt. Everest, nature has become the playground of the independent film maker. The Mother of Waters points to one of the strengths of independent film making and tells a story I can’t believe I didn’t even know anything about. China is building five dams on the Mekong River, on its path from Tibet to the South China Sea. That’s a big deal because the world’s richest inland fishery depends on the river and its replenishment of silt through flooding, a fact which keeps Asia’s poorest area and its dozens of millions of people well fed.  

The narrator of the movie becomes the first person to kayak the entire length of the Mekong River. To say the upper Mekong is violent and powerful only provides a little trickle of what it is. Just to see Mick O’Shea running it, when it literally looks like the ocean in A Perfect Storm, is worth the price of admission.